Social Norms and the Enforcement of Laws (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Signaling Power of Sanctions in Social Dilemmas
Evidence from field and laboratory experiments indicates that a large fraction of the people behave like conditional cooperators in public good games. In this article, I investigate the implications of the existence of both conditional cooperators and egoists for optimal law enforcement strategies. When norms of cooperation exist between conditional cooperators, sanctions set by an authority can be lower than in a “Hobbesian" setting where everybody is egoistic. Moreover, if the authorities have private information about the fraction of egoists in society, low sanctions can be optimal because they signal that there are few defectors and thus “crowd in" trust and cooperation between agents. In social dilemmas where conditional cooperation is an important factor, as is the case in tax compliance, the model provides a rationale for the low observed sanctions in the real world and the mixed evidence on the effectiveness of deterrence.
Enforcement and Compliance in an Uncertain World: An Experimental Investigation
The Journal of Politics, 2009
Governments are charged with monitoring citizens' compliance with prescribed behavioral standards and punishing noncompliance. Flaws in information available to enforcing agents, however, may lead to subsequent enforcement errors, eroding government authority and undermining incentives for compliance. We explore these concepts in a laboratory experiment. A "monitor" makes punishment decisions after receiving noisy signals about individuals' choices to contribute to a public good. We find that the possibility of wrongly accusatory signals has a more deleterious effect on contribution levels than the possibility of wrongly exculpatory signals. We trace this across-treatment difference to a "false positives trap": when members of a largely compliant population are sometimes incorrectly accused, some will be unjustly punished if enforcement power is employed, but non-compliant individuals will escape punishment if that power is abdicated. Either kind of error discourages compliance. An additional treatment demonstrates that the functioning of a given enforcement institution may vary, depending on its origins. We consider implications of our findings for theories of deterrence, fairness, and institutional legitimacy.
Deterrence Effects of Enforcement Schemes: An Experimental Study
Management Science, 2021
Private and public organizations are interested in finding effective ways to reduce crime and promote ethical behavior without investing heavy resources into monitoring and compliance. In this paper, we experimentally study how revealing different information about a fine distribution affects deterrence of an undesirable behavior. We use a novel incentive-compatible elicitation method to observe subjects lying (the undesirable behavior) and quantify the extent to which this behavior responds to information structures. We find that punishment schemes that communicate only partial information (the minimum fine in particular) are more effective than full information schemes at deterring lying. We explore the mechanism driving this result and link it to subjects’ beliefs about their own versus the average expected fine in treatments with partial information. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.
Norms, Enforcement, and Tax Evasion
This paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and is the source of the dynamics that we study. Our empirical analysis exploits the adoption in 1990 of a poll tax to fund local government in the UK, which led to widespread evasion. We also exploit a series of natural experiments due to narrow election outcomes, which induce shifts into single-majority local governments and lead to more vigorous enforcement of local taxes. The econometric results are consistent with the model's main predictions on the dynamics of evasion. "A widespread view among tax scholars holds that law enforcement does not explain why people pay taxes. The penalty for ordinary tax convictions is small; the probability of detection is trivial; so the expected sanction is small. Yet large numbers of Americans pay their taxes. ... Some scholars therefore conclude that the explanation for the tendency to pay taxes must be that people are obeying a norm-presumably a norm of tax payment or a more general norm of law-abiding behavior." Posner (2000, page 1782) * We are grateful to Juan Pablo Atal, Pierre Bachas, Richard Blundell, Tom Cunningham, Gabriel Zucman, and a number of seminar participants for helpful comments, to Dave Donaldson, Greg Kullman and Gordon Ferrier for help with data, and to the ERC, the ESRC, Martin Newson and the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations for financial support.
Monitoring with implicated punishment is common in human societies to avert freeriding on common goods. But is it effective in promoting public cooperation? We show that the introduction of monitoring and implicated punishment is indeed effective, as it transforms the public goods game to a coordination game, thus rendering cooperation viable in infinite and finite well-mixed populations. We also show that the addition of within-group enforcement further promotes the evolution of public cooperation. However, although the group size in this context has nonlinear effects on collective action, an intermediate group size is least conductive to cooperative behaviour. This contradicts recent field observations, where an intermediate group size was declared optimal with the conjecture that group-size effects and within-group enforcement are responsible. Our theoretical research thus clarifies key aspects of monitoring with implicated punishment in human societies, and additionally, it reveals fundamental group-size effects that facilitate prosocial collective action. Public cooperation is imperative for the sustainable management of common resources in human societies 1–3. However, human cooperation is threatened by temptations that are rooted in selfish but lucrative short-term benefits on offer when defecting or free-riding on the efforts of others 4. Like rewarding 5–9 , punishment is often employed for maintaining sufficiently high levels of public cooperation 10–19. In addition to individual efforts aimed at punishing free-riders 20–25 , our societies are home to a plethora of sanctioning institutions 26,27. In particular, during the last decade peer and pool punishment have been studied theoretically and experimentally as possible means to stabilize cooperation 20,21,26,28–36. Although ample research efforts have already been invested to inform on the subtleties of positive and negative reciprocity and their role in promoting public cooperation 11 , few studies have thus far considered implicated punishment despite it being and integral cog in various sanctioning systems in human societies. In general, the implementation of implicated punishment means that once a wrongdoer is caught, all the group members are punished, no matter whether the group members are cooperators or defectors. Such punishment schemes are particularly common for monitoring 37 the management of common resources on large scales. For example, in Nature Reserve of China, an administrative bureau is responsible for monitoring all illegal activities. When the bureau staff members detect an illegal activity in the monitored parcel, all households within the group will suffer the same fine 14. While the system may work in practice, in theory it is still unclear how fines affect cooperators that are adversely affected, and how the overall dynamics plays out in favor of prosocial behaviour.
Crime, punishment and social norms
2005
We analyze the interplay between economic incentives and social norms when individuals decide whether or not to engage in criminal activity. More specifically, we assume that there is a social norm against criminal activity and that deviations from the norm result in feelings of guilt or shame. The intensity of these feelings is here endogenous in the sense that they
Hierarchies, incentives and collusion in a model of enforcement
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2002
This paper considers a model of enforcement with corruptible enforcers in an agency framework. We examine how supervisor's choice of effort and honesty are influenced by incentives (penalty and reward schemes) and organizational structure. We consider both vertical hierarchies (corrupt supervisor monitoring another) and horizontal structures where more than one corrupt supervisor monitor the agent. The latter tend to induce less corruption but need not welfare dominate the vertical hierarchies. The organizational structure matters most when there are constraints on rewards and penalties.